Fredric Price has lived a life that resists the usual categories.

In one world, he is a life sciences executive and entrepreneur who has served as CEO of five firms, Chairman of the Board of eight companies, and board member of two other organizations. His professional record includes a key role in the approval of eight new drugs, more than $700 million raised in securities transactions, 24 merger, acquisition, and licensing transactions, two initial public offerings, FDA-approved facilities, and 18 issued US drug patents as co-inventor.

In another world, writing under the name David Hirshberg, he is a novelist of American Jewish memory.

Those two worlds might seem unrelated. One belongs to biotechnology, company-building, financing, patents, boards, facilities, regulatory pathways, and the difficult work of bringing medicines closer to patients. The other belongs to characters, families, neighborhoods, memory, moral ambiguity, dialogue, and history.

But to understand Fredric Price properly, one has to see the connection.

The connection is storytelling.

In biotechnology, storytelling is not superficial branding. It is the discipline by which a company explains why its work deserves time, risk, capital, patience, and belief. A biotech leader must help investors, scientists, employees, regulators, partners, physicians, and sometimes patients understand why an uncertain future is worth pursuing.

In fiction, storytelling performs a different but related act. It rescues human complexity from abstraction. It turns the past from a summary into an inhabited world.

That is what David Hirshberg’s fiction attempts to do.

His novels My Mother’s Son, winner of eight literary awards, Jacobo’s Rainbow, also........

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